I always compare winter to an Ansel Adams landscape:  A simple statement in black, white, and shades of grey, powerfully conveying the basic nature of my mountain wilderness.  Spring comes to the mountains in three stages:  The ‘looking desperately for hopeful signs’ stage comes first and lasts the longest.

This year, spring is late coming.  Stage two did not start until May.  In the valleys first, of course, then slowly and reluctantly spreading up in elevation, competing with snow that was still falling nightly.  On my property, a single grumpy crocus put forth a short-lived bloom.  Squirrels, running out of their winter-stored foods, chewed my other sprouting bulbs down to the roots, except for the daffodils and the Dreaded Day Lilies.  Those daffodils, naturalized throughout my pine lot, were originally 150 in number.  Less than a third of those sprouted, and, of those, a quarter grudgingly produced a single blossom.  Meanwhile, the trees were showing first a faint haze of red or yellow-green, then small delicate curled leaves unfolding.

Suddenly, yesterday, Stage 3 arrived.  My first reaction, as always, was a feeling of claustrophobia.  The leaves had abruptly gotten large and numerous enough that the broad vistas I enjoy in winter were blocked.  The second was that I had been dropped into a Peter Max painting, a psychedelic study in green.  Eyes starved for colour over the winter were overwhelmed by the intensity, as well as the many varying shades, of green.  Emotionally, it’s always a shock and a delight, coming almost overnight, as it seems, after long weeks of yearning.

That’s spring in the Northwoods:  Life imitating art, as I pass abruptly from the Ansel Adams season to the Peter Max season.  I relive the giddy joy of my hippie years, as I spin, arms out, revelling in psychedelic colour.